Symmetries and conserved quantities of boundary time crystals in generalized spin models

Abstract

We investigate how symmetries and conserved quantities relate to the occurrence of the boundary time crystal (BTC) phase in a generalized spin model with Lindblad dissipation. BTCs are a nonequilibrium phase of matter in which the system, coupled to an external environment, breaks the continuous time translational invariance. We perform a detailed mean-field study aided by a finite-size analysis of the quantum model of a $p,q$-spin-interaction system, a generalized $p$-spin-interaction system, which can be implemented in fully connected spin-1/2 ensembles. We find the following conditions for the observation of the BTC phase. First, the BTC appears when the discrete symmetry held by the Hamiltonian, ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ in the considered models, is explicitly broken by the Lindblad jump operators. Second, the system must be coupled uniformly to the same bath in order to preserve the total angular momentum during the time evolution. If these conditions are not satisfied, any oscillatory behavior appears only as a transient in the dynamics and a time-independent stationary state is eventually reached. Our results suggest that these two elements may be general requirements for the observation of a stable BTC phase relating symmetries and conserved quantities in arbitrary spin models.